I’m afraid the very silly editorial in the Weekend Australian about how environmentalists hate the proletariat, already taken to pieces by Glenn Albrecht doesn’t qualify as part of their War on Science because it doesn’t include anything on the science, but they can’t resist taking another shot at climate science, so today’s Australian has an article by political scientist Bjorn Lomborg:

Obama went on to say why he wants to prioritise global warming policies: “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Yes, global warming is happening, and mankind is partly responsible, but these statements are – however eloquent – seriously wrong or misleading.

Sea levels are rising, but they have been rising at least since the early 1800s. In the era of satellite measurements, the rise has not accelerated (actually we’ve seen a sea-level fall during the past two years).

No we haven’t. Look at the graph, who are you going to believe, Lomborg or your lying eyes?

Lomborg:

Obama’s claim about record droughts similarly fails even on a cursory level: the US has in all academic estimates been getting wetter through the past the century (with the 1930s dust bowl setting the drought high point). This is even true globally during the past half-century, as one of the most recent scientific studies of actual soil moisture shows: “There is an overall small wetting trend in global soil moisture.”

Before we look at this study, what is your estimate of the probability that Lomborg has misrepresented the study?

Despite the overall wetting trend there is a switch since the 1970s to a drying trend, globally and in many regions, especially in high northern latitudes. This is shown to be caused, in part, by concurrent increasing temperatures. Although drought is driven primarily by variability in precipitation, projected continuation of temperature increases during the 21st century indicate the potential for enhanced drought occurrence. We analyze changes in future drought occurrence using soil moisture data for the SRES B1, A1B and A2 future climate scenarios from eight AOGCMs that participated in the IPCC AR4. The models show decreases in soil moisture globally for all scenarios with a corresponding doubling of the spatial extent of severe soil moisture deficits and frequency of short-term (4-6 month duration) droughts from the mid 20th century to the end of the 21st. Long-term (more than 12 month duration) droughts become three times more common.

So there has been a drying trend since the 1970s. Which is when the temperature started increasing strongly.

Back to Lomborg:

Finally, it is simply wrong to say that storms are growing stronger every hurricane season. Even for the Atlantic hurricane basin, which we tend to hear about most, the total hurricane energy (ACE) as measured by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has declined by two-thirds since the record was set in 2005. For the world, this trend has been more decisive: maximum ACE was reached in 1994 and has plummeted for the past three years, while hurricanes across the world for the past year have been about as inactive as at any time since records began to be kept.

Don’t you like the way that for soil moisture he reported the 50 year trend, but for hurricanes it’s the trend since 2005 that he reports? Such short trends are weather and not climate. (And the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season was more active than Lomborg claims.

But it must end soon. Either Murdoch dies and The Australian is closed down because it is losing a ship-load of money, or Murdoch, the great follower, declares next year that AGW is real and The Australian agrees.

It makes no sense to correlate the graph of rising sea levels you show with Arctic ice melt and rising global temperatures unless there is an allowance made for the changing shape of our oceans.

All of our ocean basins are underlain by moving plates, sometimes moving at a rate of many millimetres/year. Many ocean trenches (often already under 5km of water) are getting deeper through plate subduction and many spreading ocean ridges are shallowing as new crust is added beneath them. Tectonic movements around oceanic margins are very frequent and locally sea levels can change by many cm/metres in single fault movements or by gradually increments over time as eustatic changes occur due to rock density differences.

The changing shapes of our oceans will make a substantial contribution to ‘average’ sea levels (compare a half full plastic water bottle which will overflow with water when squeezed). We cannot (yet) accurately measure all plate movements and therefore have no chance of estimating the exact contribution that they have on the sea level changes that we have been able to measure by satellite over the last few years.

Think about why the ocean depths are so cold. You go down in land and it gets hotter. Where does all the heat go from the water? Could it be that it gets pumped out at the poles? Could it be that the melting sea ice is a major contributing cooling factor? What of the cooling done before a protective layer of ice acts as barrier, preventing cold Arctic air from having direct contact with the Arctic sea water.
The more open Arctic sea water there is when the sun is down the more cooling that takes place.

“California is facing the most significant water crisis in its history. After experiencing two years of drought and the driest spring in recorded history, water reserves are extremely low. With the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem near collapse, court-ordered restrictions on water deliveries from the Delta have reduced supplies from the state’s two largest water systems by twenty to thirty percent.”

Lomborg is right (or was for most of 2007) regarding “actually we’ve seen a sea-level fall during the past two years”. Because there was a La Nina. The lowered sea level in the Pacific caused a drop in the measured global sea level. Exact opposite happened in 1997-1998, the big El Nino. All this shows how accurate the measurement is, and the accuracy of the overall trend. So Lomborg is right, and he’s still another grasping-at-straws idiot. (As he’s always been, one of the champions of that sport, in fact.)

a) He’s a political scientist.
[He sometimes gets labeled as a statistician, which is odd, since things like regression analyses & significance tests are hard to find in his writings.]

b) And he’s a reincarnation of Julian Simon.

c) See Things Break for a good long discussion, and for my specific comments on why Lomborg has some of the most “sophisticated” arguments, including the clever choices for the set of priorities in Cool It!

d) If people focus on his bad science, they can miss the *cleverness* of the arguments in being able to cause doubt and confusion.

Do you see how Lomborg focusses the drought issues on the US, whereas Obama is talking globally (unless you think he’s referring to spreading famine within the U.S.)

Incidentally even if there is an overall increase in national or continental average rain, droughts can still increase and be record droughts. Here in Victoria, we have had generous rain in the south east (around Sale and East Gippsland) and severe drought north of the great dividing range. Should I reassure the farmers in the north and west “Don’t worry – the state’s average rainfall isn’t down much”?

I also see that Obama said that “storms that are growing stronger” and Lomborg quotes total hurricane storm energy figures, whereas Obama was probably refering to expectations of more category 5 storms, not necessarily more total storm energy.

Is this another misdirection (switching prediction targets, like switching from global drought to U.S drought) or are the forecasts principally for more total storm energy ?

well, as long as we’re on the lomborgian “everything is getting better and better” kick, the BBC news woke me up this AM with a nice piece on how Russia is now in its third year of record warmth, resulting in plant buds strting to sprout now, which will probably be killed off by hard frost that finally comes before spring.

You ask “cooling of what?” since I was writing about Arctic sea water one would assume that the cooling was the Arctic sea water.

Any scientist that thinks that open Arctic water absorbs more energy than it radiates on an annual basis is not a scientist.

The Arctic seas absorbs more energy than it radiates for only 2-3 months of the year.The rest of the year it radiates more energy than it absorbs.

Read up on sea ice and you might be surprised about what is really going on in the polar night.
Heat does get pumped out at the poles SOD it is why the water freezes. It is why the air is so cold up there, more energy is lost to space than is absorbed in the short Arctic summer.

For those out there who ponder….little energy at the frequencies that CO2 absorbs escape from earth except at the poles. Why is this?

You ask “cooling of what?” since I was writing about Arctic sea water one would assume that the cooling was the Arctic sea water.

when it is cold, there is ICE over the water. pretty good insulation.

Any scientist that thinks that open Arctic water absorbs more energy than it radiates on an annual basis is not a scientist.

hm. we were talking about the effect of sea ice loss. losing more sea ice exposes dark water to the arctic summer sun. snow covered sea ice is black.

Read up on sea ice and you might be surprised about what is really going on in the polar night. Heat does get pumped out at the poles SOD it is why the water freezes. It is why the air is so cold up there, more energy is lost to space than is absorbed in the short Arctic summer.

i don t think what you are trying to tell me there. that the arctic is cold?

For those out there who ponder….little energy at the frequencies that CO2 absorbs escape from earth except at the poles. Why is this?

When talking about sea ice loss we need to consider the whole year not just what happens in the summer.

Also, if you look at sea ice levels on a daily basis you quickly understand that the same amount of sea ice can be compressed or expanded depending on which way the wind and current moves. ( When covered by 15% ice we have 85% open sea water which radiates more thermal energy than sea ice covered water.)
Sea ice covered with snow radiates even less energy than open sea water.

Bi, what is it that you are having problem computing? Are you saying that 2 meters of sea ice has more planetary cooling capacity than 1000 meters of sea water?

Luminous beauty told me that sea ice conducts thermal energy better than sea ice but sea water radiates from it’s surface while sea water under meters of sea ice has to radiate through that sea ice.Open sea water radiates more thermal energy (when the sun is down) than sea ice.
When the sun is up it’s energy penetrates the sea water only a short distance. When the sun is down the coolng effect of the Arctic air causes the cooling to penetrate much further.
The so called loss of ice in the Arctic has been acknowledged to have been caused by the wind/current pushing the ice into the North Atlantic. It ( the loss) had nothing to do with CO2, global warming or any other imaginary fact.
The shift in wind probably had more to do with the change in the PDO from its’ warm phase to it’s cool phase, causing a pressure differential between the pacific and the Atlantic air masses.

Kent, you do realize that you haven’t a clue about what you are discussing. You have got just about everything wrong.

Because of the reduction in ice cover, energy is transferred from the sea (you do realize that sea water is 20 to 30 degrees warmer than the air temperature in the fall, don’t you?) and warms the air thus leading to longer and longer warm spells with which to melt more perma-frost and release large amounts of methane and CO2. This is what is termed a feed back.

Here is a quote from a scientist who works on this very problem and knows far more than you claim to know:

“The warming climate is leading to more open water in the Arctic Ocean. As these open water areas develop through spring and summer, they absorb most of the sun’s energy, leading to ocean warming.

In autumn, as the sun sets in the Arctic, most of the heat that was gained in the ocean during summer is released back to the atmosphere, acting to warm the atmosphere. It is this heat-release back to the atmosphere that gives us Arctic amplification.”

Yes the warmer Arctic water gives energy to the air which does two things. Half the equation tells us it warms the air. The other half is that it cools the water. The warmer air radiates that energy spacewards but the cooler water sinks.
To ignore the cooling effect of sub-zero air on Arctic/polar waters and only focus on the shorter warming of it’s surface waters is to be involved in bad science.
That scientist you quotes starts off with the assumption that more open water is caused by global warming. Ignoring the wind and the current. Which even Nasa’s Hansen agrees with now…..took him over one year to accept what has been widely known.
Ian, I do have a clue about what I am discussing. More so than you seem to have. Learn a little more about sea ice dynamics before you mouth the global warming party line about how open water contributes to warming mean while ignoring what happens when the sun is low on the horizon or below it.
So much of what these scientists come up with is based on faulty assumptions.
When they stated that Arctic temperature sensors have been melted out in November I wonder if they fell through a lead that had nothing to do with melting but had lots to do with wind and currents.

kent, basically everything that you write is entirely false or doesn t make any sense.

That scientist you quotes starts off with the assumption that more open water is caused by global warming. Ignoring the wind and the current.

your talk about the “wind” is mixing up major facts. in deed, part of the massive arctic sea ice loss in 2007 was probably caused by unusual wind conditions. but the “wind” does NOT explain, the continous loss of sea ice over the last 30 years!

Kent said: “Ian, I do have a clue about what I am discussing. More so than you seem to have”. Then why do you not prove it to us by discussing real science and not the junk you have picked up on denier web sites?

Since you do not appear to understand what happens when arctic sea ice melts here is a brief discussion.

Do you realize that the arctic ice has a low salinity? I guessed that you would be ignorant of that fact. Therefore the water does not immediately sink as you seem to think since it is less dense than the Arctic sea water.

I do not “mouth the global warming party line” but study the basic sciences (I bet I have a much larger knowledge of science than you appear to have) which are responsible for the observations being made in the Arctic regions. The science is quite simple if you really want to study it.

The wind/current explains the loss of ice in the big,big,story about massive ice loss to the lowest level ever recorded.

The loss of ice over the last 30 years is not the big story you would have us believe SOD.
If you actually look at the sea ice records you would know that the level of sea ice bounces up and down.
Since records started sea ice has never gone up or down for more than 3 consecutive years. The same holds true for the Antarctice except for the 5 years from 2002-2007.

The Maximum level of Arctic sea ice in 1979 ( a cold year) was only 15 million square Km. Last year it was 14 million sq.Km.
The minimum went from about 5 million to about 3 million which was caused by the wind/current. Which just so happens to be when the PDO switched to it’s cool cycle.Coincidence? Maybe.
Interesting that if the Arctic is warming the greatest area of new ice was formed last year (2007) than has ever been recorded. 3-14 million sq. Km. for a new ice formation of 11 million.
P.S. If you can’t make sense of what I write maybe you should look at your own lack of knowledge/abililty rather than to accuse me of such.

I see you are confusing sea water, first year sea ice and multi-year sea ice. Multi-year sea ice is for most purposes acts like fresh water ice. First year sea ice is salty while sea water is salt water.

My focus regarding open Arctic sea water relates to the cooling of salty sea water not multi-year sea ice.

As you say, melting multi-year sea ice is less dense than sea water and… and… and thus causes it to stay on the surface… and…prevents warmer sea water from coming to the surface, thus restricting energy flow from the Arctic sea to the atmosphere.
You would loose your bet and by the way the science is not that simple. If it was, the scientists who study these things would have figured out that Arctic heat gain is as important as Arctic heat loss, but they haven’t so it isn’t.

SOD,
You don’t look at the facts, if you did you would notice that the Max. level of sea ice at the site you linked to does not go up or down for more than three years consecutively. That is what I said and that is what your own fact linked site shows.
The PDO is a 60 year cycle with 30 years warm, 30 years cool.
You wrote, lots of sea ice melted. I wrote already that the wind blew it into the north Atlantic. La Nina had little to do with it but the PDO is another question.
Your… the year before was 13 million ignores the fact that the satellite that is giving us the data was launched in late 1978 so there is no max for the “year before”. You are not useing facts SOD. You are misinterpreting the facts to support your warmist ideaology.
I wish it was warming, I really do, but I don’t let my wishfull thinking get in the way of reality.
If it warms there is little to worry about, if it cools, just staying warm,growing enough food will be a major problem. Gound source heat pump is my solution.

Kent said: “Ian, I have studied science for over 50 years”. Well I wouldn’t have known unless you told me. Too bad that you didn’t learn something from all that studying. If you paid for your “studying” I would check to see if you are eligible for a refund.

If you had been reading actual science papers rather than the denier rubbish you seem to be addicted to you would have known that I was correct in my statement about the salinity of the melted water.

You (and other deniers) seem to be fixated on the extent of the ice coverage when in fact the total volume of the ice is what is important in the long term.

There has been an approximately 40% decrease in the thickness of the permanent multi-year ice. Where do you think that loss has gone? Evaporated into the air?

Why do you not do some reading before spouting all that nonsense and pretending that you know some thing about the science.

but apart from that:going down for 3 consecutive years is utterly meaningless! we know, that the sea ice area is fluctuating (every year, for example..). the important thing is the long term TREND. and it is obviously DOWNWARD.

You wrote, lots of sea ice melted. I wrote already that the wind blew it into the north Atlantic.

why don t you bring up a link, that supports this wind theory? and not just for the 2007/08 period?

I wish it was warming, I really do, but I don’t let my wishfull thinking get in the way of reality.

sorry, but you are in complete denial of reality. the claim that the arctic is not warming is simply FALSE.

Ian, I agreed that multi-year sea ice is essentially fresh water ice. First year sea ice is salty amd melts at minus 1.6 degrees C, while multi year sea ice melts at 0C.( on the surface while the ice that forms on the underside is first year sea ice and the -1.6 applies)

Your statement about “Permanent” multi year sea ice ignores the fact that multi-year sea ice is only 3-7 years old. It is not permanent despite the fact that sea ice is always there. The normal Arctic currents sweep the multi-year ice into the North Atlantic.
As for ice depth? Which has more insulating capacity 3 meters of ice or 1 meter? Which has more cooling capacity 3 meters of ice or 1000 meters of sea water?
SOD, 2003 to 2006 is three years 04-05-06 three years just as I wrote.

and again, this is beside the point. it is completely meaningless, to search for “consecutive” years of falling maximum. it is the TREND, that is important.

i assume that you wage did increase over your life time. but did your (real, meaning inflation adjusted) wage often increase for 4 years consecutively?
if it didn t, does that mean that your wage didn t increase at all? (hint: TREND!)

Kent, please go and read some physics texts and some books on how to construct a logical argument. You are horribly confused. Read what the scientists are saying not what you read on denier web sites. Here is a quote (again) from a scientist who is studying these things: “The warming climate is leading to more open water in the Arctic Ocean. As these open water areas develop through spring and summer, they absorb most of the sun’s energy, leading to ocean warming.

In autumn, as the sun sets in the Arctic, most of the heat that was gained in the ocean during summer is released back to the atmosphere, acting to warm the atmosphere. It is this heat-release back to the atmosphere that gives us Arctic amplification.”

(Julienne Stroeve, of the NSIDC)

Are you trying to tell me that you know more about the science than she does? You are both arrogant and stupid if that is the case.

Ian, the quote you gave is highschool level rhetoric. Every sentence can be torn apart. Arctic amplification? Is the Arctic getting bigger? No real scientist would write like that, a journalist would, a propoganist would but not a scientist.
SOD trend is a relative term….the trend was for the stockmarket to go up but….a killing frost may go against the trend but IT (the killing frost) is what is important not the trend.
If you want to focus on the trend in Arctic ice, the only trend is up and down up and down.

If all you can do is try to insult me then you really are not interested in dialog, you just want to mess in Tim’s sand box.
I am off to Central america for 2 months but might drop in to see what your side is up to.

Kent said: “If all you can do is try to insult me then you really are not interested in dialog”. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with someone who is irrational and dishonest. Your claims of knowing science are complete nonsense. That is not an insult merely a true reflection of how you have portrayed yourself to be on this blog.

If all you can do is try to insult me then you really are not interested in dialog.

Seriously matey, if all you can come up with – repetitiously – is nonscientific nonsense, then you should expect scientific dialogue to fall by the wayside and be to replaced by comments about your lack of understanding.

Believe me, we would welcome dialog if it consisted of you actually taking on board the corrections to your manifold errors. However, you are as recalcitrant in your ignorance as the many other trolls in the denialosphere who are afflicted with the same intellectual earwax, and this makes proper exchange impossible.

If the comments are insulting… well, this simply reflects the magnitude of your resistance to learning.

What you’re seeing in that link Paul is ‘area’ as measured in sq. kilometers- and still well below the baseline avarage. First year ice is thin and will readily melt seasonally.
.
A more important measure is ‘volume’ caused by multiple year freezes building thickness into the ice making it more resilient in the melt season. PIOMAS shows this is to be still on a sharply declining trend.